It's the call all classical male actors half hope for and half dread when they reach a certain age. Ray Reinhardt got his earlier this summer at his home in New Mexico.

Would he be interested, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival wondered, in playing King Lear?

"The first thing I did," Reinhardt recalled recently, "was go outdoors and get a pot full of earth. It was late, around 11. I came back inside, covered myself in body lotion and caked on the dirt. I've always felt Lear should be naked on the heath -- not nude, but naked -- covered in earth, returning to it."

Reinhardt, at 71, was doing what he's always done as an actor. He was feeling his way toward a role through his senses, taking the concept and language of a character in through his skin and lungs, his pores and dramatically flaring eyes and nostrils.

"I love using my body and voice," he said, in a musical timbre that seems to tap a full set of woofers and tweeters in even the most casual conversation.

"I love taking the stage."

In his 27-year run as a tragedian and farceur at the American Conservatory Theater, Reinhardt built a formidable reputation for his intelligent, vividly physicalized portrayals. Highlights include Alfred Ill in "The Visit," Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire," a memorably distressed McLeavy in "Loot" and the lethal Lawyer in "Tiny Alice." That was the part he was playing on Broadway, opposite John Gielgud and Irene Worth, when he caught the eye of ACT founding director Bill Ball in 1965.

Reinhardt went on to mount the tragic heights of James Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1987) and "Death of a Salesman's" Willy Loman (at the San Jose Repertory Theatre in 1993). More recent local credits include "Slavs!" in Berkeley and "Old Wicked Songs" in San Jose. He and his wife sold a home near the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco last year and "retired" to Santa Fe.

RETIRED, BUT NOT REALLY

"I'll probably never stop acting entirely," Reinhardt conceded. Taking on one of Shakespeare's mightiest roles is about as far from hanging up the spurs as it gets.

For "King Lear," which opens Friday at the Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Theater, Reinhardt has some direct experience to tap. Like the woefully demanding king, he's the father of three daughters, now ages 40, 30 and 27.

"They're all like Cordelia," he quickly added over a post-rehearsal Japanese meal. "They're all sweethearts." But parental rage, he allowed, if somewhat less Shakespearean, is familiar to him. He gazed away, far away, from his chicken teriyaki for a moment.

Reinhardt is wary of playing the sentimentality in Lear's plight. He likes to think of the character as a man relishing his retirement -- "hunting, carousing, fishing, going to the Caribbean when it gets cold in the wintertime." Deep incredulity more than anger that his beloved daughters would turn on him is the taproot of Reinhardt's psychological understanding of Lear.

Reinhardt can quickly catalog other great actors he's seen in the role -- Paul Scofield, Orson Welles, Morris Carnovsky ("the most human"). He admits to an "intimidation factor" and turned festival director Charles McCue down when he first offered the part. McCue was on an 11th-hour search after John Cullum withdrew for the Broadway transfer of "Urinetown."

Age, Reinhardt said, bestows a freedom to make choices and not worry too much about the outcome. "What am I afraid of? A bad review? Not giving the 'right' interpretation?" Reaching 70 also brings "chemical changes" that seem congruent with playing Lear: "I cry more readily. I am emotionally touched more easily."

"Lear" director Paul Barry, 70, found an instant camaraderie with the easygoing Reinhardt and the production's Fool, played by 74-year-old Gerald Hiken. "We're the old farts' clique," said Barry. "We sing those awful songs from the '40s. It's a point of reference."

BORN IN THE BRONX

Born and raised in the Bronx, Reinhardt had a gift for mimicking the New York polyglot of German, Yiddish, Italian and Puerto Rican accents. But he didn't pursue theater until he got a part in "Golden Boy" when he was in the Army. Reinhardt studied at the Piscator Dramatic Workshop in New York and London's Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He's been an actor, mostly in the theater, with some character work in television and movies, ever since.

With that resplendent voice, a kinetic physical presence and hair that has been white for decades, Reinhardt commands a stage easily. Julian Lopez- Morillas, who has played Lear himself and is cast as Gloucester in the current production, detected a "warm, almost avuncular quality" in Reinhardt's early rehearsals.

Seated on an unfinished plywood throne in the festival's rehearsal space in Hunters Point, Reinhardt was working on Lear's first scene. More specifically, he was trying out a ripe belly laugh and the rhythm of a phrase -- "Unburden'd crawl toward death."

Trucks rumbled by on the street. A train clanged and hooted close by. "Un- bur-den'd," Reinhardt said again and then again, rolling out the syllables in their own procession. Those noisy engines were no match for it.